James Mitchell wrote:What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth eat in calories per year? What changes could be made to our diets for the amount of calories to equal the energy of the Sun?

I feel like he kinda skimmed this one. He didn't go into a comparison of food energy density. No mention of a hybrid Mr. Coffee/Mr. Fusion appliance. No mention of whether you could start a fire from the blackbody radiation of enough hamburgers.

I did enjoy the link to The Rock's diet. And I'm right with you, Randall, on the silliness of moving from J to kWh and mAh. Even better when the electric bill is basically kWh/month.

(I'm sure I saw the latter form with a "reduced price" label, in a supermarket, shortly after it changed. But then I did the maths on other options, and it was still a disadvantageous valuation. I haven't bought them since...)

He addressed the energy output of the Sun, but not what fraction of it is directed at the Earth in a single day (unless it is somewhere implied that those figures are actually Earth figures and not Sun figures).

James Mitchell wrote:What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth eat in calories per year? What changes could be made to our diets for the amount of calories to equal the energy of the Sun?

While you could interpret that as only the energy that reaches Earth it does not literally say that. It says "the Sun's heat". Not the part of the sun's heat that actually reaches earth. As such Randal immediately answers the question:

0.000000000065%.

If we do take only the energy output that reaches the earth we must divide the percentage by the fraction of the sun's energy that reaches earth.The fraction of the energy that reaches earth is the area of the sun-facing circle of the earth (the area of a circle with a radius of 6,371.0 km) by the surface of a sphere with a radius of the radius of the Earth's orbit.That is 1.275×108 km2 divided by 2.812×1017 km2 = 4.534139402560455192034139402560455192034139402560455 × 10-100.000000000065%/4.5 × 10-10 = 0.14%

Mikeski wrote:A "What If" update is never late. Nor is it early. It is posted precisely when it should be.

James Mitchell wrote:What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth eat in calories per year? What changes could be made to our diets for the amount of calories to equal the energy of the Sun?

While you could interpret that as only the energy that reaches Earth it does not literally say that. It says "the Sun's heat". Not the part of the sun's heat that actually reaches earth. As such Randal immediately answers the question:

0.000000000065%.

If we do take only the energy output that reaches the earth ...That is 0.14%

... which compares fairly well to the .33% of Earth's biomass that we supposedly represent ... or would if all that inbound energy was being stored in biomass form and none of it re-radiated, but if any less or it gets re-radiated into space we're gonna be pretty much screwed. Are we, in fact, over-budget there and burning up calories faster than the biosphere can store them?

Echo244 wrote:Now I just want to contribute to Randall's Creme Egg pile...

Meh, Cadbury Creme Eggs are nothing. Here in Iceland we have "Páskaegg" (lit. "Easter Egg"), which are like this:

Basically, giant decorated chocolate eggs. They're hollow, but inside they're filled with other candies. Sometimes I get one, empty out the candies and fill it with ice cream. It takes a lot of ice cream to do so

I bet a mixture of páskaegg and cadbury cream eggs would have a steeper angle of repose than one of pure cadbury eggs or pure páskaegg.

This gets a lot more interesting if "we" is properly redefined. Biohuman brains die, and are suboptimum for long term survival. We will soon add external enhancements and high bandwidth connections to biobrains, and before long "we" will become those enhancements, avoiding pesky annoyances like death and boring travel slower than the speed of light.

Planetary surfaces are too hot, corrosive, small, and gravitationally deep to support optimal computation. Arrhenius activation of bit rot (storage decay processes) is exponential with temperature, way too fast at 310 Kelvin. That explains 25 keV per biological bit operation - most of that is noise averaging, redundancy, and maintenance in a substrate approximating Jello. A Stapledon-Dyson shell made of nanostructured ice and supported by light pressure at 50 AU radius is closer to optimal, with a black body temperature of 60 Kelvin, operating at 4 meV (milli, not Mega) per bit operation. A 60K human-mind-equivalent might consume 5 microwatts rather than 30 watts (or the 240 watts consumed by Dwayne Johnson's body).

The sun's 384 trillion terawatt output, and the material available in the Kuiper belt and inner Oort cloud, could support 8e31 (80 decillion) human-equivalent minds for the next 5 billion years. 4e41 mind-years, compared to the approximately 1e12 mind-years the Earth has produced so far.

Slowing orbiting material to stationary light-pressure-supported "statites" requires ejecting a sizable fraction of the starting material out of the solar system to conserve linear and angular momentum. This is a handy source of materials for slow star probes (approximately 30 km/s). Those star probes (von Neumann replicators encased in shock-absorbing crumple shells) can prepare similar Stapledon-Dyson shells around the rest of the stars in our neigborhood, expanding to the whole galaxy in a billion years or so. Beaming minds from shell to shell across the galaxy will require less than 100 kiloyears.

This amplifies the Fermi paradox to uncomfortable levels. While earthlike planets are rare, ice bodies probably surround most star systems, easy stepping-stones for expansion. If any extraterrestrial civilization emerged more than 100 Myears ago, a large region of the galaxy would be englobed, and emitting copious amounts of 60K radiation and little visible light - obvious to an infrared space telescope. If they began more than a gigayear ago, our own star system would be inside a similar shell, the night sky would be 60K rather than 2.7K, and there would be no visible stars. We might never consider travel to stars we don't know about.

I spent two months in 2015 exploring this, extrapolating the ultimate consequences of server sky. Search for "Stady" (Stapledon-Dyson) on that site for more (disorganized) calculation and speculation. The organized material will be a chapter in a book.

KarenRei wrote:Meh, Cadbury Creme Eggs are nothing. Here in Iceland we have "Páskaegg" (lit. "Easter Egg"), which are like this:

Not purely a purely mid-Atlantic(-ridge) phenomenon, I assure you. I can't definitively speak for the US (I presume that it happens!) but the shops in the UK are full of actual Easter Eggs, right now. (Some places started displaying them at least since the New Year deals started to be deshelved.) I can't give you the ins-and-outs of all those available, but they used to ('80s) commonly be hollow-shelled eggs with a plastic bag of mini-treats rattling around inside. Then at one point there was a trend of selling "eggs and mugs", usually to a theme (e.g. Transformers or Barbie, for the stereotypical male and female children) and usually a smaller egg so that it 'sat' in said mug; or then there's ones themed to an existing chocolate bar (e.g. Yorkie Bar, usually in a 'truck-themed' box, that could be played with) with such a bar (normal or 'fun-size', or multiple mini-sized) also packaged up in there.

Or else you can go to some specialist chocolate shop like Thorntons for a large (usually hollow, but rarely enclosing additional treats) and decorative/decorated egg, or bunny, very similar to those photos there, which can even have be personalised with names/messages/etc piped onto it in some form (probably white chocolate, or even coloured white chocolate, especially for the football(/soccer) fans who want red-and-white, blue-and-white or whatever as a them.

Meanwhile, Cadbury's Creme Eggs are available year-round. There is a splurge of either supply or demand1 around Easter, for the obvious reasons of tapping into the general chocolate egg (and bunny, and all the rest) demand, but at my house we didn't subscribe them as actual Easter Eggs. Our family name for CCEs was "Easter-Eggs-You-Don't-Eat-At-Easter".

1 Whichever it is, there's obviously a presumption of the other. But, unlike Easter Eggs, a mismatch between the two doesn't matter so much. If they run out, there's still Easter Eggs while new stock gets brought in, and if they don't sell then they'll happily sit around for a while and still be saleable after Easter at normal (non-Easter) rates, and the supermarket can just cut back on the 'regular' supply for a month or two until their computers tell them they might need to badger the supplier to ramp up to background production/delivery levels again.

KarenRei wrote:Meh, Cadbury Creme Eggs are nothing. Here in Iceland we have "Páskaegg" (lit. "Easter Egg"), which are like this:

Not purely a purely mid-Atlantic(-ridge) phenomenon, I assure you. I can't definitively speak for the US (I presume that it happens!) but the shops in the UK are full of actual Easter Eggs, right now.

I used to live in the US; they're not a tradition over there. I mean, you can surely find something similar if you put forth the effort, but it's not the sort of thing where you walk into grocery stores and there's shelves full of them. The closest you might come is "large" hollow chocolate easter bunnies, but they don't as a norm reach the level of commonness or size (by a good margin) and they're not generally candy filled.

In the US, "Easter Egg" means hard boiled egg that has been dipped in food dye. They generally make them with their kids from kits with color tablets that you dissolve in vinegar, and parents often hide them (or plastic eggs designed to look like them) in the garden for their kids to find. Some people ultimately eat the eggs afterward, but my impression is that most people throw them out.

For most people in the US, Cadbury Creme Eggs are an easter-only tradition, along with "peeps" (unnaturally yellow marshmallow chicks) and random individually wrapped low-quality milk chocolates.

KarenRei wrote:I used to live in the US; they're not a tradition over there.

I did have my doubts about my assumptions, I must say.

And it seems that although Halloween got across, got tricked (and treated!) up a gear, then re-imported back to the UK again, it seems that the 'paganesque' egg-decorating aspect got across but not the full-on chocolate thing.

Echo244 wrote:Now I just want to contribute to Randall's Creme Egg pile...

Meh, Cadbury Creme Eggs are nothing. Here in Iceland we have "Páskaegg" (lit. "Easter Egg"), which are like this:

Basically, giant decorated chocolate eggs. They're hollow, but inside they're filled with other candies. Sometimes I get one, empty out the candies and fill it with ice cream. It takes a lot of ice cream to do so ;)

I bet a mixture of páskaegg and cadbury cream eggs would have a steeper angle of repose than one of pure cadbury eggs or pure páskaegg.

Those páskaegg appear to be about twice the size of Easter Eggs here. I'm jealous. Particularly of the child with a páskaegg half as big as she is...

And... filling it with ice cream? That's a *genius* idea. I mean, not something I could do and then eat on my own. But still, sounds... yes, like something that needs to be done.

Unstoppable force of nature. That means she/her/hers.Has committed an act of treason.

... which compares fairly well to the .33% of Earth's biomass that we supposedly represent

Not really, because we're comparing solar output per day with human consumption per year.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

Well, if threee figures are significant, then fifty-two figures is almost twenty times as significant.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Heartfelt thanks from addams and from me - you really made a difference.

"Some child could choke on the toy inside this hollow chocolate egg! Won't Someone Think Of The ChildrenTM??"

Joe Q. Senator sponsors a bill. Bill gets passed, because everyone in Washington gets votes when they Think Of The ChildrenTM.

The Law sits on the books forever, after changing the situation it was meant to change (no more imported Kinder Eggs.)

Someone else runs afoul of the law 60 years later. They (Nestle corporation) lobby for new regulations to exempt their Magic/Wonderballs. Their competition (Mars) lobbies against that. Current lobbyists and politicians make out like bandits for something that they didn't do. (Notice: "lobby for new regulations". Not "lobby to get the old one repealed". We can't have less Law. That's just crazy talk.)

Everyone in America is guilty of a federal felony of some sort; there are just too many dumb laws on the books. Whether or not you're prosecuted is up to some federal flunky. (King Cakes? Who wants to be the prosecutor arguing against the baby Jesus? And it'd probably get thrown out on Religious Accommodation grounds so the Judge didn't look bad.) Sometimes this works out beautifully (see: Capone, Al, and Evasion, Tax). Sometimes it's a travesty (see: Lerner, Lois, and Party, Tea).

I'm pretty sure the classic King cake would be flat-out illegal as a commercial product. Doing it at a private party, with advance notice to the guests would probably be legal but might still leave you liable to a later lawsuit.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was an explicit exception for edible containers.

Heading off on a tangent.... I thought about the angle of repose for Cadbury Eggs. It clearly depends on scale. Small-scale, perhaps with chilled CEs, you're balancing ovoids of given density and friction (wrinkled aluminum foil). When the pile gets large enough, the eggs start smooshing into each other, and eventually collapse into a "cell-like " mass of chocolate and sugar-cream (ETA: with air bubbles), partitioned by aluminum-foil membranes. Somewhere about this point, it starts to heat up from pressure, and if you pile high enough, that stuff starts flowing.

And a third thought: Those Big Macs might have a little more energy if they got fused instead of eaten.

Also: I understand the point behind his comparing solar plasma to reptile bodiles, but holy cow is that a garden-path analogy. The reptile is producing the heat by metabolizing stuff it ate, which it then throws away. The plasma is fusing an infinitsmal fraction of its own mass....